King Edward VI College in Stourbridge (near Birmingham) is a sixth form college with around 2000 students aged 16 – 18 from the West Midlands. It teaches almost exclusively AS and A levels and encourages students with ambitions for further study. The college holds a Higher Education Conference each March for Year 12 students who will be applying to universities in the autumn. This starts the students thinking about what and where to study. The conference has presentations by over 30 university academics and this year I talked about studying the biomedical sciences at university.

Around 350 students take A-level Biology at the college so there are many with ambitions within the biological and medical sciences. My aims were to illustrate how Biology A-level can lead to many worthwhile careers apart from medicine as well as explaining the diversity of biomedical science degrees that are available. I ended up speaking to two groups of around 50 students. They were very attentive and some made notes. When I put up a ‘typical’ timetable at university, there were a few exchanged expressions of surprise at the amount of contact time. The questions afterwards showed great enthusiasm for biomedical research. The college clearly has ambitious students who plan rewarding and socially valuable lives.